T&C March Cover Star: Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Elegant and brimming with talent, the Oxfordshire-raised, Shakespearean-trained Gugu Mbatha-Raw may be relatively new to America, but having galvanized critics here in two radically disparate roles, she's better poised than most young actors to cross over.

I meet Gugu Mbatha-Raw on the weekend that two of three New York Times film critics proclaim her movie Beyond the Lights one of the year's best. Manohla Dargis publishes what amounts to a 900-word love letter to it. "Oh yeah, a friend of mine texted it to me," Mbatha-Raw says, almost uncertainly, when I ask her about these accolades. She seems befuddled by my excitement for her. "I mean, it's really lovely. It's great for the movie to, you know, have that establishment stamp from the New York Times." She jauntily mimes stamping a piece of paper approved. "But reviews, numbers—they're not for me. They're for other people to read and absorb and analyze."

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Mbatha-Raw seems equally unattached to the idea of winning statuettes. Just the week before, she won the Best Actress trophy at the British Independent Film Awards for another 2014 movie, Belle, remarking only that "it was lovely because my parents came. I hadn't been home to the U.K. for six months."

Formerly a stage and small screen actress in England, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art–trained Mbatha-Raw first made waves stateside when her West End production of Hamlet, in which she played Ophelia opposite Jude Law, came to Broadway, in 2009. That was followed by a starring role in the much-hyped but short-lived J.J. Abrams television series Undercovers and, in 2011, by a part in theTom Hanks filmLarry Crowne. (She had heard Hanks wanted anAmerican for the role, so she ditched her British accent when she met him. "I think he saw some cheeky gumption in that!" she says.) All of which is to say that, at 31, Mbatha-Raw is not the overnight Next Big Thing you might think from Belle, in which she stars as a corseted biracial aristocrat in18th-century England, and Beyond the Lights, set a few centuries later, in which she plays Noni, a scantily clad pop star who seems perpetually poised for a wardrobe malfunction. (Different as the two films are, Mbatha-Raw's costumes in each feel like the bookends of female oppression.) In terms of demonstrating range, it's the sort of one-two punch CAA agents spend years plotting for their clients. "I would love to say that I'm some sort of evil mastermind who strategized it," Mbatha-Raw says, pausing to giggle as she sips green tea at aManhattan restaurant. "But when I got both roles I did think, This is great—you can't put me in a box!"

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"I had wanted to be the first one to put her out as a star," says Gina Prince-Bythewood, who wrote and directed Beyond the Lights(and before that Love & Basketball and The Secret Life of Bees). "But ultimately I think it was better for my movie to come out second, because Belle put her on the radar with critics and catapulted her to a 'This is truly somebody special' place."

Photography by Victor Demarchelier Styled by Nicoletta Santoro

Considering Mbatha-Raw's Queen's English and refined demeanor, Belle—which is based on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an African slave and a British naval officer from a wealthy family (The Good Wife's Matthew Goode)—certainly seems the lesser stretch. Still, it's the kind of role the biracial actress had trouble scoring in the past. "Growing up and going to RADA, so many of my peers go on to do period dramas, which is what we're known for in the U.K.," she says. "And I had all this classical training but, in some ways, nowhere to put it. It was fascinating to be able to do a movie like Belle—something period, with that Jane Austen feel, in which I wouldn't be playing a slave or someone in a brutalized role."

Beyond the Lights proved a bigger leap—one that almost didn't happen. "The film was set up at

a studio that wanted a musical artist, and originally I thought I wanted that as well," Prince-Bythewood says. "And then I found Gugu. It was one of the best auditions I've experienced. I watched her create the whole movie before my eyes."

But the studio balked at casting a virtual unknown and eventually let the film go. Mbatha-Raw and Prince-Bythewood ended up shooting an eight-minute short to present to other studios. "I had to show them she had the chops," the director says."Ultimately, Relativity [which financed it] said, 'We see what you see—this person is a star.' "

Mbatha-Raw grew up in Witney, a rural and typically quaint Oxfordshire town best known for its blanket making cottage industry. It's a place, the actress has said, where she never felt discriminated against. Her parents separated when she was quite young; she remains close to her father, a black South African doctor, but she was raised by her mother Anne, a white British nurse. Anne Raw is the very opposite of the driven stage mom Minnie Driver plays in Beyond the Lights; she allowed her only child to indulge an early love of performing via local plays and ballet training but never entertained her pleas to become a serious child actor."Growing up in a single-parent household, I remember my mom working so hard and coming home exhausted and not really loving what she did," Mbatha-Raw says. "It was a practical job. I remember early on thinking, I am going to do something I love." Still, working in Hollywood "seemed an almost preposterous idea."

Photography by Victor Demarchelier Styled by Nicoletta Santoro

Even more unlikely was the idea that in 2013 she would find herself cutting tracks with American rap star The-Dream and learning dance sequences from choreographer Laurieann Gibson—guru to Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, and Katy Perry—in the service of becoming Noni, a personified criticism of the entertainment industry, and particularly of its brutal demands on and objectification of women. "The hardest part was being in the dance studio with no hair or makeup or costumes,with bare lighting, and Laurieann giving me twerking lessons and being like,'You need to grab yourself here,' " Mbatha-Raw says with a laugh, her embarrassment apparent even now. "I had to watch myself do this in the mirror, and I think that's something that separates an actor from a rock star or a model: Actors are constantly trying to forget their own image. So the hardest thing was looking myself in the eye and playing along with that flirtatiousness."

"The thing about Gugu is not just her talent but her insane work ethic," Prince-Bythewood says. "It was six months of learning not just to dance but also how to tap into that narcissism and hypersexuality, which is so far from who she is. Then weeks more trying to kill the vibrato in her classically trained voice." Indeed, during filming, Kill the Vibrato became something of a mantra for Mbatha-Raw, who spent her childhood idolizing Cole Porter and Ella Fitzgerald. ("We had a cassette in my mom's car called Forever Ella,and we always played it on the way to ballet class until one day the ribbon unwound.") In the end this contemplative former straight-A student, this English rose ballerina, succeeds in out-Rihanna-ing Rihanna. (For quick proof,search for "Noni Masterpiece" on YouTube. Follow that with photos of Mbatha-Raw in prim Oscar de la Renta on the red carpet.)

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"She is one of the most focused individuals I've ever met," says fellow British actor Chiké Okonkwo, who has been friends with Mbatha-Raw since the two were teenagers. Okonkwo roomed with her for four years in the Chiswick neighborhood of London when they were both starting their careers, and he describes her as a sister to him. "She could have been a scholar. And she's an extremely conscientious person, so she was a very tidy roommate," he says. "But things would be ever so slightly less tidy when she was preparing for a role. Everything else always became secondary."

The reaction to Beyond the Lights has been overwhelmingly positive, with Oprah Winfrey e-mailing Mbatha-Raw to say that in addition to loving the film she felt it was "good for the culture." Mbatha-Raw agrees, "especially in terms of its message to young girls."

Photography by Victor Demarchelier Styled by Nicoletta Santoro

When shooting wrapped, Mbatha-Raw took her first trip to South Africa, a three-week solo journey."After spending so much time trying to be another person, I always think it's good to go somewhere to regain perspective," says the actress, who likes her travels far-flung (she has been to Egypt and Thailand) and preferably incorporating yoga, which she practices seriously. "I had been doing all these films about exploring identity, and I thought, My god, I haven't even been to South Africa, and it's so much a part of me, of my cultural background. I just had never been able to carve out the time I felt I needed to do it justice."

The trip began with a yoga retreat in Mozambique, "and then I went to Durban and Johannesburg to see family, and my grandparents' graves in Pretoria. Then for two days I took this charming Orient Express–type train to Cape Town, and it was just incredible to look out the window at the landscape." Talking about the journey leaves her nearly breathless. "I took a picture of myself on top of Table Mountain, and I had my first surfing lesson," she says, adding that she later learned that the waters were shark-infested.

Mbatha-Raw happened to be in South Africa when Nelson Mandela died. "It was significant for me on so many levels," she says. "On the day of the funeral I was actually in a town called Gugulethu" (her full first name; it means "our treasure" or "our pride" inZulu). "It was surreal."

If Beyond the Lights—or its star—isn't recognized during awards season, the blame may go to the film's underwhelming marketing campaign (the posters make the film look like a cheesy romance about people with an aversion to shirts) and the unfortunate and routine marginalization of a movie with two minority leads. In any case, Mbatha-Raw is unconcerned with the celebrity a bigger box office might have brought her. "The outside fanfare doesn't affect her in the slightest," Okonkwo says. "She's exactly the same person she was when she was 16."

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That said, it's not as if she's been missing from the red carpet of late, in part because she is currently starring in Andy and Lana Wachowski's futuristic fantasy Jupiter Ascending, alongside Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum. More saliently, she's designer catnip. "Gugu has effortless grace and natural warmth," says Renée Zellweger, a veteran of countless red carpets who struck up a friendship with Mbatha-Raw on the set of their upcoming legal drama, The Whole Truth. "And she's a beauty," she adds. It's the most obvious point to make about the fresh-faced Mbatha-Raw, an admitted style neophyte. "In my daily life it's about being comfortable. I wear a lot of black," says the actress, her hair pulled back in a messy bun. "But now, to promote these films, I've been working with a stylist. I've had some fun Cinderella moments in red carpet land. I love the Audrey Hepburns of this world, and I think Cate Blanchett is stunning and always nails it."

Photography by Victor Demarchelier Styled by Nicoletta Santoro

The message of Beyond the Lights, it would seem, is Mbatha-Raw's innate message as well. "It's important to know that it's okay to be your natural self," she tells me. "It's also okay to dress up and wear makeup and hair extensions if you want, so long as you don't feel like you need that or will be worthless without it. The point is, it should be a choice.

"It's funny," she adds, "Belle and Beyond the Lights are so different, yet both of those movies pose the question of who defines you: yourself or the society you're in?"

When it comes to the movie business, that question becomes particularly tangled. Hollywood is a place Mbatha-Raw has started, reluctantly, to call home. At this point she's getting too much work to leave. She's currently shooting a film with Will Smith in Pittsburgh, playing the wife to his doctor—the man who first discovered the connection between football concussions and degenerative brain disease—and she was just cast opposite Matthew McConaughey in the Civil War drama Free State of Jones, based on the true story of Newton Knight's armed rebellion against the Confederacy.

"Gugu's about to explode," Prince-Bythewood says. "It will be interesting to see what happens to her, working with Will Smith, who changed the game in terms of promotion and knowing the Hollywood game inside and out. But right now she seems determined to do only work that inspires her, and I hope it stays that way. People say that's naive," she adds, "but it doesn't have to be."

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